Authors: Tana French
“Sean,” I called. “Damien.” Sean bounded over eagerly and held up his hand for a high five, gave me a knowing look when I ignored it. Damien came more slowly, hitching up his combats. He looked dazed almost to the point of concussion, but coming from him this didn’t exactly set my alarm bells ringing.
“We need to talk to you,” I said. “We’d like you to wait in the canteen for a while, until we’re ready to take you back to headquarters.”
Both their mouths opened. I turned and left before they could ask. We put them in the canteen, along with a flustered Dr. Hunt—still clutching handfuls of paperwork—and left O’Gorman to keep an eye on them. Hunt gave us permission to search the site, with an alacrity that moved him further down the suspect list (Mark demanded to see our warrant, but backed off fast when I told him I’d be happy to get one if he didn’t mind waiting around for a few hours), and Sophie and her team headed for the finds shed and started taping brown paper over the windows. Johnston, out on the dig, moved among the archaeologists with his notebook out, checking trowels and pulling people aside for brief tête-à-têtes.
“The same key fits all the Portakabins,” Cassie said, coming out of the canteen. “Hunt, Mark and Damien have one each—not Sean. No spares. They all say they’ve never lost, lent or missed their keys.”
“So let’s start with the sheds,” I said, “and then we can work our way out-In the Woods 323
wards if we need to. Sam, will you and Cassie take the tools shed? Sweeney and I will do the office.”
The office was tiny and crammed—shelves sagging with books and houseplants, desk piled with papers and mugs and bits of pottery and an elephantine, obsolete computer. Sweeney and I worked fast and methodically, pulling out drawers, taking down books and checking behind them and stacking them back roughly in place. I didn’t actually expect to find anything. There was nowhere here to stash a body, and I was fairly sure the trowel and the plastic bag had been either dumped in the river or buried somewhere on the dig, where we would need the metal detector and huge amounts of luck and time to find them. All my hopes were pinned on Sophie and her team and whatever arcane rites they were performing in the finds shed. My hands moved automatically along the shelves; I was listening, so hard it nearly paralyzed me, for some sound from outside, footsteps, Sophie’s voice calling. When Sweeney dropped a drawer and cursed softly, I almost screamed at him to shut up.
It was gradually dawning on me just how high I had staked on this. I could have simply rung Sophie and got her to come down and check out the finds shed, no need to mention it to anyone if it didn’t pan out. Instead, I had taken over the entire site and pulled in just about every person who had anything to do with the investigation, and if this turned out to be a wildgoose chase I didn’t even want to think about what O’Kelly would say. After what felt like an hour I heard, outside, “Rob!” I leaped up from the floor, scattering papers everywhere, but it was Cassie’s voice: clear, boyish, excited. She bounded up the steps, caught the door handle and swung round it into the office. “Rob, we’ve got it. The trowel. In the tools shed, under all these tarps—” She was flushed and breathless, and she had obviously completely forgotten that we were barely on speaking terms. I forgot it myself, for a moment; her voice sent the old, bright dart of warmth straight to my heart.
“Stay here,” I said to Sweeney, “keep searching,” and followed her. She was already running back to the tools shed, feet flashing as she jumped the ruts and puddles.
The tools shed was a mess: wheelbarrows at various wild angles, picks and shovels and mattocks tangled against the walls, great teetering stacks of dented metal buckets and foam kneeling mats and neon-yellow visibility vests (someone had written insert foot here, with an arrow pointing downwards, on the back of the top one), everything crusted in ragged layers 324
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of dried mud. A few people kept their bikes there. Cassie and Sam had been working from left to right; the left-hand side had that unmistakable postsearch look, discreetly tidy and invaded. Sam was kneeling at the back of the shed between a broken wheelbarrow and a heap of green tarpaulins, holding up the corner of the tarps with one gloved hand. We picked our way through the tools and squeezed in beside him.
The trowel had been jammed down behind the pile of tarps, between them and the wall; jammed hard enough that the point, when it caught halfway down, had gouged a rip into the tough material. There was no lightbulb and the shed was dim even with the big doors open, but Sam shone his torch on the handle:
sc
, big uneven letters with Gothic serifs, charred deep into the varnished wood.
There was a long silence; only the dog and the car alarm, on and on in the distance, with identical mechanical determination.
“I’d say the tarps aren’t used very often,” Sam said quietly. “They were behind everything else, under broken tools and all. And didn’t Cooper say she was probably wrapped in something, the day before she was found?”
I stood up and dusted bits of muck off my knees. “Right here,” I said.
“Her family was going crazy looking for her, and she was right here all the time.” I had got up too fast, and for a moment the shed rocked around me and receded; there was a high white buzz in my ears.
“Who’s got the camera?” Cassie said. “We’ll need to photograph this before we bag it.”
“Sophie’s lot,” I said. “We’ll need them to go over this place, too.”
“And look,” Sam said. He shone the torch over at the right-hand side of the shed, picked out a big plastic bag half full of gloves, those green rubber gardening gloves with woven backs. “If I needed gloves, I’d just take a pair out of there and throw them back in afterwards.”
“Detectives!” Sophie yelled, somewhere outside. Her voice sounded tinny, compressed by the lowering sky. I jumped.
Cassie started to spring up, glanced back at the trowel. “Someone should probably—”
“I’ll stay,” Sam said. “You two go on ahead.”
Sophie was on the steps of the finds shed, a black-light in her hand.
“Yeah,” she said, “definitely your crime scene. He tried to clean up, but . . . Come see.”
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The two baby techs were crammed into a corner, the guy holding two big black spray bottles, Helen with a video camera; her eyes were large and stunned over her mask. The finds shed was too small for five and the sinister, clinical incongruity the techs had brought with them turned it into some makeshift guerrilla torture chamber: paper covering the windows, bare lightbulb swinging overhead, masked and gloved figures waiting for their moment to step forward. “Stay back by the desk,” Sophie said, “away from the shelves.” She slammed the door—everyone flinched—and pressed tape back into place over the cracks.
Luminol reacts with even the tiniest amount of blood, making it glow under ultraviolet light. You can paint over a splattered wall, scrub a carpet till it looks brand-new, keep yourself off the radar for years or decades; luminol will resurrect the crime in delicate, merciless detail. If only Kiernan and McCabe had had luminol, I thought, they could have commandeered a crop-spraying plane and misted the wood, and fought down a hysterical desire to laugh. Cassie and I pressed back against the desk, inches apart. Sophie motioned to the boy tech for the spray, flicked on her black-light and switched off the overhead bulb. In the sudden darkness I could hear all of us breathing, five sets of lungs fighting for the dusty air. Hiss of a spray bottle, the video camera’s tiny red eye moving in. Sophie squatted and held her black-light close to the floor, near the shelves. “There,”
she said.
I heard Cassie’s small, sharp intake of breath. The floor blazed bluewhite with frantic patterns like some grotesque abstract painting: spattered arcs where blood had burst outwards, blotchy circles where it had pooled and started to dry, great swipes and scrub-marks where someone panting and desperate had tried to clean it away. It glowed like something radioactive from cracks between the floorboards, etched the rough grain of the wood in high relief. Sophie moved the black-light upwards and sprayed again: tiny droplets fanning across the bottom of the metal shelves, a smudge like a wild grabbing handprint. The darkness stripped away the finds shed, the messy papers and bags of broken pottery, and left us suspended in black space with the murder: luminescent, howling, replaying itself again and again before our eyes.
I said, “Jesus Christ.” Katy Devlin had died on this floor. We had sat in this shed and interviewed the killer, smack bang on the scene of the crime.
“No chance that’s bleach or something,” said Cassie. Luminol gives false 326
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positives for anything from household bleach through copper, but we both knew Sophie wouldn’t have called us in here until she was sure.
“We’ve swabbed,” Sophie said briefly. I could hear the dirty look in her voice. “Blood.”
Deep down, I think I had stopped believing in this moment. I had thought an awful lot about Kiernan, over the past few weeks: Kiernan, with his cozy seaside retirement and his haunted dreams. Only the luckiest of detectives makes it through a whole career without at least one of these cases, and some traitor part of me had insisted from the start that Operation Vestal—the last one in the world I would have chosen—was going to be mine. It took a strange, almost painful adjustment of focus to understand that our guy was no longer a faceless archetype, coalesced out of collective nightmare for one deed and then dissolved back into darkness; he was sitting in the canteen, just a few yards away, wearing muddy Docs and drinking tea under O’Gorman’s fishy eye.
“There you go,” Sophie said. She straightened up and switched on the overhead light. I blinked at the bland, innocent floor.
“Look,” said Cassie. I followed the tilt of her chin: on one of the bottom shelves was a plastic bag stuffed with more plastic bags, the big, clear, heavy kind the archaeologists used for storing pottery. “If the trowel was a weapon of opportunity . . .”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Sophie said. “We’re going to have to test every bag in this whole bloody place.”
The windowpanes rattled and there was a sudden, wild thrumming on the roof of the shed: it had started to rain.
20
It rained hard all the rest of the day, the kind of thick, endless rain that can soak you to the skin as you run the few yards to your car. Every now and then lightning forked over the dark hills, and a distant rumble of thunder reached us. We left the Bureau gang to finish processing the scenes and took Hunt, Mark, Damien and, on the off-chance, a deeply aggrieved Sean (“I thought we were partners here!”) back to work with us. We found them an interview room each and started rechecking their alibis. Sean was easy to eliminate. He shared a flat in Rathmines with three other guys, all of whom remembered, to some extent, the night Katy had died: it had been one of the guys’ birthday and they had had a party, at which Sean had DJed till four in the morning, then thrown up on someone’s girlfriend’s boots and passed out on the sofa. At least thirty witnesses could vouch for both his whereabouts and his tastes in music. The other three were less straightforward. Hunt’s alibi was his wife, Mark’s was Mel; Damien lived in Rathfarnham with his widowed mother, who went to bed early but was positive he couldn’t have left the house without waking her. These are the kind of alibis detectives hate, the thin, mulish kind that can wreck a case. I could tell you about a dozen cases where we know exactly whodunit, how and where and when, but there is absolutely nothing we can do about it because the guy’s mammy swears he was tucked up on the sofa watching The Late Late Show.
“Right,” O’Kelly said, in the incident room, after we had taken Sean’s statement and sent him home (he had forgiven me for my treachery and offered me a farewell high five; he wanted to know if he could sell his story to the papers, but I told him if he did I would personally raid his flat for drugs every night until he was thirty). “One down, two to go. Place your bets, lads: who do ye fancy?” He was in a much better mood with us, now that he knew we had a suspect in one of the interview rooms, even if we weren’t sure which one.
“Damien,” Cassie said. “He fits the MO, bang on.”
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“Mark’s admitted he was at the scene,” I said. “And he’s the only one with anything like a motive.”
“As far as we know.” I knew what she meant, or thought I did, but I wasn’t going to bring up the hired-gun theory, not in front of either O’Kelly or Sam. “And I can’t see him doing it.”
“I’m aware of that. I can.”
Cassie rolled her eyes, which I actually found slightly comforting: a small savage part of me had expected her to flinch.
“O’Neill?” O’Kelly asked.
“Damien,” Sam said. “I brought them all a cup of tea. He’s the only one picked his up with his left hand.”
After a startled second, Cassie and I started to laugh. The joke was on us—I, at any rate, had forgotten all about the left-handed thing—but we were both wound tight and giddy, and we couldn’t stop. Sam grinned and shrugged, pleased at the reaction. “I don’t know what ye two are laughing about,” O’Kelly said gruffly, but his mouth was twitching, too. “You should’ve spotted that yourselves. All this jibber-jabber about MOs. . . .” I was laughing too hard, my face going red and my eyes watering. I bit down on my lip to stop myself.
“Oh, God,” said Cassie, taking a deep breath. “Sam, what would we do without you?”
“That’s enough fun and games,” O’Kelly said. “You two take Damien Donnelly. O’Neill, get Sweeney and have another go at Hanly, and I’ll find a few of the lads to talk to Hunt and the alibi witnesses. And, Ryan, Maddox, O’Neill—we need a confession. Don’t fuck this up. Ándele.” He scraped back his chair with an ear-splitting screech and left.
“Ándele?” said Cassie. She looked perilously near to another bout of the giggles.
“Well done, lads,” Sam said. He held out a hand to each of us; his grip was strong and warm and solid. “Good luck.”
“If Andrews hired one of them,” I said, when Sam had gone to find Sweeney, and Cassie and I were alone in the incident room, “this is going to be the mess of the century.”